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BlogApril 2014

​I wrote a blog early in 2012, noting the fact that the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) had grown to include over 600,000 entries. CSD users that visit our online portal to the CSD (known as WebCSD) will see that the latest update (released on 25th March) pushes the size of the CSD to over 700,000 entries.

What users may not be aware of is that the CSD has actually held over 700,000 entries since December 2013, but in a way that’s a bit harder to spot. WebCSD is frequently updated to include the additional crystal data as it reaches us here in Cambridge. The last update of 2013 brought the total number of structures in the CSD to over 687,000. Not a particularly round number you may think. However, the update also included the most recently published data available to the CCDC - over 19,000 structures - which we make available alongside the CSD as CSD X-Press. That brought the total number of structures available to CSD users to over 700,000!

As announced in our DOI press release we are delighted to be now assigning Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) to datasets of crystal structures deposited with CCDC. You may be familiar with the use of DOIs alongside article citations. These provide a persistent link that is guaranteed to take you to a page that provides metadata associated with an article and invariably a link to the article itself. Assigning an identifier such as a DOI reflects a desire for published content to be easily discoverable for the long term. CCDC believes that just as articles are worthy of citation, so too are the datasets that represent the primary output of the crystallographic community. We are not alone in this view as is evidenced by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (http://www.force11.org/datacitation) to which CCDC fully subscribes. These principles recognise the importance of data as a citable product of research for which credit and attribution is due. They also highlight attributes such as unique identification, access, persistence, versioning and interoperability which assigning DOIs can help facilitate.